This is part of our series: “The Evolution of Daily Standups in 2025,” where we explore how daily meetings are evolving to empower team collaboration. For previous installments, see:
1. Why your daily standups need to evolve
2. Five practical ways to make daily standups matter
In our first two articles on daily stand-ups, we talked about ditching scripts and focusing on sprint goals.
We then explored how mental models shape team performance. Great ideas in theory, but let's be honest, many attempts to transform stand-ups crash and burn.
Today, we're talking about why that happens and what to do about it. The research on "Managing from the Boundary" gives us a framework to understand where leaders go wrong when trying to change team practices.
Let's start with a contradiction: self-managing teams still need leaders. As Druskat and Wheeler point out, "At first pass, it appears paradoxical that a self-managing work team would require a leader."
This explains a lot about failed stand-up transformations. Scrum Masters and managers step back too quickly, expecting teams to magically embrace new practices without guidance. Or they hover anxiously, undermining the team's ownership.
One Scrum Master put it bluntly: "I announced our new stand-up format on Monday, watched it fall apart by Wednesday, and was back to running the whole show by Friday. I had no idea how to lead without controlling."
Before we dig into solutions, let's be brutally honest about the warning signs:
If this sounds familiar, don't blame your team or the method. The problem is likely how you're leading the change.
The research identified four functions that separate effective leaders from mediocre ones. Let's see how they apply to saving your stand-up transformation:
Teams won't adopt practices that make them vulnerable unless they trust you and each other. Period.
📖 Try this: Have direct conversations with resistors. Not "how can we improve the stand-up?" but "I notice you seem frustrated with our new approach. What's your honest take on it?"
One tech lead told me: "My manager finally asked why I hated the new stand-up format. I told him it exposed that I didn't understand half of what other teams were doing, which made me look incompetent. Once we addressed that, I could get on board."
Don't skip this step. No trust, no transformation.
Effective leaders constantly gather intel about both team dynamics and organizational pressures. They don't assume they know what's going on.
📖 Try this: After a week of your new stand-up format, ask three questions anonymously:
Don't ask if people "like" the new format. Ask what's actually happening and why it matters (or doesn't).
Leaders need to understand "both the big picture and the little picture." This isn't philosophical, it's practical. If you don't know where the resistance is coming from, you're just pushing rocks uphill.
Good leaders influence in all directions. They convince their teams of the value of new approaches while advocating for their teams with management.
📖 Try this: Collect specific examples of how goal-focused stand-ups improve outcomes. "When Wei mentioned his API changes yesterday, Sophia realized she needed to adjust her implementation. That saved us at least a day of rework."
Use these stories both with your team and with skeptical managers who want to know why stand-ups now take 18 minutes instead of 15.
Here's where most stand-up transformations die: leaders delegate responsibility without actual authority.
The research is clear that empowerment isn't just saying "you decide." It's about "setting the team up for success in decision making."
📖 Try this: After modeling the new approach for two weeks, explicitly hand over ownership—with parameters. "You've seen how I've been facilitating. This is your meeting now. The non-negotiable is focusing on our sprint goal, but how you do that is up to you."
Then shut up and let them figure it out. Even if it's messy at first.
The research highlights three common pitfalls of effective teamwork that will also kill stand-up transformations:
Average leaders focus either internally (team dynamics) or externally (organizational demands), rarely both. For standups, this means you might be great at facilitating the meeting but ignore how external pressures undermine it.
One developer vented: "Our Scrum Master keeps pushing this goal-focused stand-up, but then our product owner storms in with 'critical' requests every afternoon. It's like they're living in parallel universes."
💡 The fix: Use your position at the boundary to align expectations. When the VP of Sales says "we need this feature NOW," translate that into "how does this affect our sprint goal?" Don't let your team get whiplashed by conflicting messages.
The research quotes an external leader named George who nails the problem: "For 20 years, I always made the decisions... To now turn it over to an hourly person and say, 'You go ahead and make this decision.' I was so afraid they would make the wrong decision that I wouldn't let them sometimes."
This shows up in stand-ups when you jump in to "fix" the conversation or subtly undermine team decisions.
💡 The fix: Call yourself out. "I notice I'm stepping in a lot. I'm going to shut up for the next week. If the standup goes off the rails, that's valuable information." Then physically move outside the team circle.
This is uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
The research notes that even great leaders struggle when "upper management doesn't support our advisor." If your organization values hitting deadlines over team collaboration, your standup transformation will face serious headwinds.
💡 The fix: Get ruthlessly practical about the business value. Track metrics that leadership cares about (velocity, release predictability, etc.) before and after implementing your standup changes. Make the business case, not just the feel-good collaboration case.
The goal isn't to create standups that work only when you're hovering nearby. You want practices that become self-sustaining.
This happens when teams see clear connections between their standup behaviors and real outcomes. "Remember how quickly we caught that integration issue because of our goal-focused conversation? That saved us days of debugging."
Over time, the team maintains effective practices because they work, not because you're watching.
If your stand-up transformation is struggling, here are three immediate steps:
Leadership at the boundary means knowing when to step in and when to back off. It's not about having all the answers, but creating the conditions where better standups can emerge.
When standup transformations fail, it's rarely about the technique. It's almost always about the leadership context. Fix that, and the practices will follow.
So, what leadership habit will you change before tomorrow's standup?
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